Survivor Song(66)

She pauses at the top step. The cold, late-afternoon air is three steps down. Ramola turns away and says, “Doctor, what if we refuse? Are you going to physically remove us?”

Natalie is next to Dr. Kolodny and the bus driver, who is standing, a full head taller than Natalie. He wears a mask and gloves. The large staff member looms behind Natalie, the bags slung on his shoulders, his free hands extended and open, as though ready to reach and grab. The way they look at her, the way everyone on the bus looks at her, Ramola knows the answer to her last question.

Natalie aims her face at the doctor, and hisses. “You can’t eat her . . .” She slides her hand out of Ramola’s and swipes at the doctor, hitting her in the left side of her head above the ear. There isn’t much power behind the strike, it’s exploratory, an opening salvo, the distant rumble before a storm. But it’s enough that the bus explodes into shouts and shrieks. The driver and the large staff member clamp onto Natalie’s arms and wrestle her down the bus stairs.

“I know all your names!”

Ramola is forced out of the bus, stumbling backward, and she twists and falls off the plunging final step to the pavement. She lands in the mouth of a driveway, scraping her palms.

The bus driver is next out of the bus and he tugs hard on Natalie’s left arm. She is forced to step heavily onto the road. One leg buckles but they prop her up, prevent her from falling. Now on the street, the driver and staff member drag her away from the bus. She screams and thrashes her head side to side, and when the men finally let go, giving her a little shove away from them, they jog back to the bus.

Ramola clambers onto her feet and steps between Natalie and the retreating men. She hushes and holds her arms up in surrender. Natalie quiets instantly, a plug pulled. Her shoulders hunch, her chest deflating into itself. One hand rubs her belly, then drops limply to her side.

With one foot on the road and the other on the first step, the large staff member tosses the two bags near Ramola’s feet. He says, “I’ll make the doctor call again. This is wrong and I’m sorry. Good luck.” The doors rattle closed behind him, and the moment he’s inside the bus pulls away.

Where the road meets the end of the cracked and pothole-filled driveway, a black metal mailbox perches atop a crooked white wooden post. The red flag is missing. Ramola takes a picture of the mailbox. She texts the street address and, in a separate text (mindful of the data crunch continuing to compromise the local cellular network), she sends the photo to Dr. Awolesi, who has yet to respond to any messages.

An old white farmhouse is at the other end of the drive, set back from the road about one hundred feet. The dilapidated home squats in a wide field of dry, dead grass, with at least another three acres of land beyond it. Ramola assumes this area was once a working farm that included the vast empty field across the street, its tree line pushed back another couple hundred feet. There isn’t another home visible in either direction. The gray sky is low and falling.

Natalie walks and talks in circles, her orbit gradually carrying her up the farmhouse’s drive.

“Natalie? Please stay. There will be a car coming for us soon.” Ramola can barely get the words out of her mouth without either crumbling or exploding. She swears, shoulders the two bags, looks down the empty road in both directions, and trots after Natalie.

“We haven’t had much luck on the road today, have we?” Ramola says when she catches up. “We really should wait by the mailbox so they’ll more easily find us when they arrive.” What kind of lie is one not of your own fabrication but is instead a repeating of someone else’s meant-to-be-broken promise?

Natalie shakes her drooped head, whispers trapped within her mask.

Ramola scoots ahead and blocks Natalie’s path again. Natalie walks until she bumps into Ramola belly-first, bouncing her a few steps backward. Natalie laughs a bully’s laugh, which weakens Ramola’s legs and steals her spirit. She’s never felt smaller.

Natalie squeezes her eyes together, holds them closed for a beat, and when she opens them there’s a flicker of light, a flicker of who she is or was. She says, “I hurt so much. I’m not doing well, Rams.”

Desperate to believe in and take advantage of a brief symptomatic return to lucidity, even as she knows the stolen time will be delicate, finite, and final, Ramola says, “Natalie, please stay with me.” She means Stop walking and stay with me by the side of the road and she means the impossible, forever kind of Stay with me.

“I wish I could. I’m sorry, Rams.” The tone and the gravel aren’t her voice, but the inflection is hers.

“If the police or an ambulance doesn’t come, we’ll hitch a ride with any car that passes by.”

“You have to get me in the house.”

“It doesn’t look like anyone is home, how do—”

“It’s not safe out here. And you won’t be safe from me.”

“The house is too far from the road. If someone drives by, they might not see us and I’m not leaving you by yourself in there to watch for cars.”

“I need to lie down. I’m about done.”

“You can have my coat and rest on the grass.”

“You have to take my phone after.”

“Natalie—”

“And tell me you’ll adopt her. Tell me yes, again, Rams. One more time. Tell me now.”